


a king under your control

by brawlite



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Fuckbuddies, M/M, Pining, Post Season 3, Rejected Kiss, Self-Hatred, Trauma, Unhappy Ending, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unresolved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 00:38:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20300584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawlite/pseuds/brawlite
Summary: Steve Harrington deserves someone better than Billy Hargrove, it's just that simple.





	a king under your control

“Jesus, what the fuck are you _doing_?” Billy shouts, making his voice go hard, making it go _mean_.

When Billy’s palms meet Harrington’s chest to shove him back, Billy tries not to notice how warm and firm Steve is underneath his fingertips. He’s wearing a soft cotton shirt Billy recognizes as something Harrington sleeps in, something dated from before the time Billy arrived in Hawkins, from before both their worlds went to shit. He tries not to think about that, too. Instead, Billy focuses on slamming back him with enough force that Harrington’s stumbling, catching himself against a wall with a broken, betrayed look on his face.

Billy’s lips are still warm from the unexpected press of Steve’s. They still tingle with the memory of a kiss, heated and startling and devastating, all at once.

“What the hell, Billy?” Steve’s voice is wrecked, raw. Hurt. Billy tries to relish it, tries to let it feed the fire inside him, the way it usually does when he knocks someone off their feet, when he gets someone right where it hurts.

Steve’s lips are pretty and pink, slick with spit and pressed into a pout. He’s got a hickey on his collarbone in the shape of Billy’s teeth, still blossoming and bruised from the last time. His hair’s a mess. It looks soft, thick. Billy wants to touch it, wants to tear it out with his fists. He wants to use it to pull Steve back in for another go.

“What the hell was that?” Billy asks. Affronted.

There’s anger coiling in his chest, red hot and dangerous. He loves the bitter taste of it, the way it goes sour on his tongue.

“Oh, I’m sorry if I thought I could _kiss you_,” Steve snaps, sarcastic and biting. “Considering everything else that we’ve done, I figured _that_ would be fine.”

Billy tries, rather desperately, not to _consider everything else_ they’ve done.

He keeps his thoughts to little flashes of heat, of warmth, of spit and hunger. He thinks of pleasure and pain and choking down moans into the hollow of Steve’s throat. He thinks of fingers fisted in sheets and barely ever even bothering to say _goodnight_.

“It’s definitely _not_ fine,” Billy says.

“So, it’s all fine as long as someone’s getting their dick touched? As long as someone’s getting off. Oh, okay, yeah, _that_ tracks.”

Steve doesn’t call out the time he let his lips linger too long on Billy’s forehead when he thought Billy was sleeping. He doesn’t say anything about the time he combed his fingers through Billy’s hair for _hours_, even though they both were finished and spent. He doesn’t mention anything about the way Billy presses his face into the curve of Steve’s neck afterwards and just breathes him in. He doesn’t bring up any of that, and he doesn’t bring up how Billy didn’t pitch a fit about any of those.

He also doesn’t say what Billy’s thinking, which is: _this was inevitable_.

It was so inevitable. Something soft and sweet was bound to break this sharp house of cards they’ve been building up together, piece by piece.

This thing of theirs is made of barbed wire and sharp edges. It’s brittle, barren. Already half-broken when they’d started.

The two of them don’t match up; Billy _knows_ that. He doesn’t need to think on it, doesn't need to examine it -- it’s just a fact of nature.

Picture perfect Steve Harrington isn’t suited, in any way, for someone half-formed and fractured, like Billy Hargrove. He wasn’t before, when it was just a basketball-court rivalry between the two of them, and he _certainly_ isn’t now, after it all of it, after Billy’s world was turned upside down, after he was burned away from the inside, out. There’s nothing left inside him, now -- nothing that wasn’t charred and tarnished by that _thing_. There’s nothing left to match up against Steve Harrington.

Steve takes a wobbling step forward. Billy takes a halting one back.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Billy spits. He swallows the broken glass in his throat and wonders why he feels it right underneath his ears, in his tear-ducts, in his _lungs_.

“I thought we were _past_ this,” Harrington says.

“We aren’t past anything,” Billy says. And when that doesn’t pack the punch he wants, when it doesn’t send Steve reeling, he reiterates, with venom: “We aren’t anything.”

It’s easy, what they’ve been doing. It’s easy because it’s nothing.

Because Billy’s nothing, too.

Still, they should’ve stopped this months ago. Billy knows better, he knows --

He knows they should’ve never started.

But. But it’s just that Billy _needs _it. He _needs _to feel tethered into his own body, needs someone to hold him down and keep him from floating away. If someone’s not there, he just sinks too far into the darkness that sits at the bottom of his ribcage, the darkness that threatens to consume him every night. It’s better if Billy spends the empty nights of winter in someone else’s bed, in someone else’s car, in someone else’s _arms_. It’s better if Billy isn’t left alone with himself anymore.

But that doesn’t mean it has to be Steve.

It never _should’ve_ been Steve.

It’s just that Steve was _there_. And Billy was lonely and empty and broken. And Steve didn’t say no, when Billy reached out.

Steve Harrington was just a warm body, a means to an end. Sure, it was easier because Steve _got_ it, because Steve didn’t ask about his scars, because Steve seemed to need somebody too -- but it’s not like Billy isn’t still a pretty face. He can get what he wants wherever. He can get what he wants _anywhere_.

It’s just that -- what Billy _wants_ \--

Well.

He’s not supposed to _want_.

And it’s not that he _does_.

He just sees Steve’s face when he closes his eyes because Steve’s who he’s been spending most of his time with. It’s Steve’s body he thinks of when he jacks off in the shower, because Steve’s the only person he’s been with, _since_. It’s only natural. Billy’s just a victim of his circumstances.

“Will you fucking _stop_?” Billy shoves Steve back again when he tries to edge closer.

But Steve’s less of a useless idiot than Billy remembers. He’s more solid, too. His feet are planted and he doesn’t budge.

“You wanna stop being such an asshole?” Steve says.

He’s too close to Billy. It’s too much.

A flame, too close to loose gunpowder. Steve’s _dangerous_ for Billy. And Billy’s dangerous for Steve, too.

Billy bites back the kick of fear and bares his teeth. He used to fight with a real smile, overjoyed and feral, but he can’t find that delight in himself anymore. He can still run his mouth like nobody’s business, though. That’s easy, that shit’s ingrained straight into Billy’s blood, right down into his very core.

“I’m who I always am,” Billy says. And then, “Aw, did you get confused, Harrington? Did you think you were special to me?”

The words are bitter and malformed on his tongue. He spits them out anyway and watches them land like barbs. Little hooks, digging in.

He wants Steve to bristle, but instead he barely flinches.

Maybe he’s been through too much. Maybe they both have.

Maybe Steve got knocked around the head too many times and his reaction times are now shot. Billy would know. He remembers the way that plate cracked right over Harrington’s head, the way it yielded and shattered in his hands. He’s seen the scar from that night, the one that sits in Steve’s hairline, the one that Billy’s traced with his finger before, after Steve’s fallen solidly asleep.

“You’re a real piece of work, Billy,” Steve says.

Billy grins. That’s easy fuel to his fire, nothing he’s never heard before. He can practically smell the gasoline in his nostrils.

“So they tell me.”

“It’s not a fucking compliment,” Steve says.

He keeps inching closer.

Billy’s fist clenches at his side. His knuckles itch.

“Why are you still pressing this shit, Harrington?” Billy asks. “Clearly you aren’t going to get what you want.”

“Do you even know what I want?” Steve asks. “Do you even know what _you_ want? Cut the _bullshit_, Billy.”

Billy laughs, loud and mean. “_Bullshit? _You want me to _cut the bullshit?_ This whole _thing_ is bullshit, that’s all it ever was. All I wanted was a fuck, a warm hole to put my dick in.”

Steve scoffs, throwing his hands up, a mean laugh barking out of him. Like maybe Billy’s laughter is contagious. “Yeah, because _that’s_ how it normally went. Not like you ever _begged_ me for --”

Billy rushes at him, grabbing him by the shirt and shoving him up against the wall at Steve’s back. Steve’s head thuds against the plaster, but he’s braced for it. Like he’d been expecting it to go down like this. Billy gets up in Steve’s face, teeth bared, blood hot -- gone from zero to boiling in his veins in seconds.

“Shut the _fuck_ up, I didn’t beg you for _shit._”

He punctuates his words with a shove, like if he tries hard enough, he can drive Steve through the wall by sheer force of will alone.

Steve doesn’t fight back, though. He just lets Billy shove him, lets him snarl and shout and shake.

Billy _wants_ Steve to fight back, though. He wants the sting of a bloody lip, the bite of a black eye, the ache of a punch to the gut. If he can’t have his usual fight, if he can’t have his usual fuck, then what good even _is_ Steve Harrington?

“If that’s how you wanna remember it,” Steve says. “Then by all means.”

Billy’s knuckles fist at Steve’s collar, at the soft fabric of his shirt, pulling it tight. Taut. Until he hears it tear, just a bit. He uses it to slam Steve back again, trying to shake a little fight out of him, trying to shake _anything_ out of him that isn’t soft, anything isn’t painfully, viciously true.

“You don’t get to kiss me, Harrington,” Billy says, “and you _don’t _get to fucking talk to me like that.”

Billy deserves some goddamn _respect_.

“Like what?” Steve asks, all sweet. “Like we’re friends, or like we’ve been fucking for _months_, Billy?”

A hiss escapes his lips at the words. He shoves Steve again, hands at his shoulders, now, pinning him to the wall with the weight of his body.

“We’re not anything,” Billy snarls. He’s close, _so close_ to Steve’s face. Barely even a couple inches away. He can feel Steve’s breath against his mouth. “You’re not _anything_ to me.”

Steve’s lips are pretty and pink when they twist into a ferocious smile. It’s mean, it’s cruel, and it’s _knowing_. Billy knows what they taste like, knows just how it would feel if he were to just press that bit closer and close the gap between the two of them.

That two inches, though -- it feels like miles.

He aches, deep in his chest, to sprint it. But he can’t. His feet are glued to the floor. Held there with twisting, blackened vines. By what’s left inside himself, by the knowledge that Steve deserves so much _better_ than who Billy was, than who he is _now_.

“_Billy_,” Steve says, and his eyes look so full of pity, so full of promise. So gentle. So absent of the hurt that Billy was trying for, and only filled with a brutally patient compassion, instead. A knowledge that Steve _gets_ him, better than even Billy himself.

It stings.

It _hurts_.

It’s a fight he knows he can’t win, even though he wants nothing more than to tear Steve apart. For Steve to do the same to him.

“Billy,” Steve says again. “It’s okay.” Patient, _kind_.

Knowing.

Billy pulls back like he’s been burned. He stumbles backward, much the same way that Steve did when Billy pushed him off his lips. But worse. More thrown for a loop, more unprepared. More broken inside and unable to find his own balance.

He was never a coward before. He always stood his ground, even when he couldn’t fight back. He always took the punches delt, always kept his jaw squared. He was always, _always_ brave enough to plant his feet and face what was coming to him, with either his fists or the weight of his ego behind him.

Now, he runs.

His name echoes in his ears, quieter and quieter as he pushes out of the house and into the street. Soon, all he hears is the hammering of his feet against pavement -- no direction in mind other than _away_ \-- and the unending sound of his heartbeat pounding fast and deafening in his head.

His lips still tingle with the phantom, perfect press of Steve’s.

**Author's Note:**

> done for a prompt fill. long enough that i figured i'd post it on here. 
> 
> you can catch me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/brawlite) or [tumblr](http://brawlite.tumblr.com), if you are so inclined.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [a knight at your command](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839899) by [thursdayknight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thursdayknight/pseuds/thursdayknight)


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